God's Choice (New Beginnings UMC)

We're talking about God's choice, God's choice.

I don't know about you, but one of the potentially most

traumatic experiences of my growing up was every time we

were picking teams for something every anyone else find that

traumatic when they were growing up?

I I was never never is probably a stretch.

I I had a wide array of friends. It was unusual if I was ever the

first pick, very, very unusual. Most of the time I was just

hoping not to be the last person picked and it because what, what

are there 2 criteria? When you're choosing up teams as

kids to play whatever you're going to play, the people doing

the picking have one of two criteria who can friendship and

skill. Friendship.

There are those team captains are like, I don't care if my

friend can hit, kick, throw, run, whatever.

They're my friend. I want them on my team.

And then there are those kids that are picking her like I'm

going to win this game. I'm going to get the best people

on my team, even if it's my worst enemy.

Friendship and skill. We're going to see today from

through the story of Jacob and Esau, how God blows all of that

out of the water when God chooses, when God chooses.

So have you ever heard the term primogeniture?

It's, it's an old word. It's a, it's a scholarly word.

It's not, It's one that's difficult to work into the

conversation when you're hanging out with folks at the restaurant

or the bar on Friday evening. It's just tough to work it in.

Can I guess? Sure.

First in the family, Yes. Yes.

The law or custom at the time of Jacob Deesaw, probably more of a

custom than a law, was the right of the eldest, usually the son,

to inherit the entire estate of one or both parents

primogeniture. And this was law or custom at

somewhere depending on. We don't know exactly when

Abraham lived. If he predated a hammer Robbie

then it was probably just custom.

If he post dated a hammer Robbie, it might well have been

law at the time that Jacob and Esau were born that the first

born son inherited it all. And there were some socially

useful reasons for this. You didn't want families

literally going to war after the death of the patriarch and

matriarch to divide up the spoils.

You wanted a peaceful transfer. You didn't want the chaos or the

cost of that. And if everyone just agrees, or

if the law says that the eldest son gets it all, and it's the

responsibility of the eldest son to provide for all of the

siblings, then that makes things smoother and simpler in matters

of inheritance. There were reasons for it.

Whether those reasons justify, we'll talk, but there were

reasons for it. That was the rule of prime and

generature, and that was the very rule that God ignored with

Jacob and Esau. And that wasn't the only time

that God ignored it. But with Esau and Jacob, God

violates the cultural custom and tradition of prime and

generature before they were born.

God said to Rachel, the older will serve the younger blowing

it out of the water. The older will serve the younger

Now since that and it wasn't the only time that it happened God,

it was shadows of this with Cain and Abel when God accepted the

offering of the younger brother but not the offering of the

older brother. God was even more dramatic with

this with David when when David, the youngest son was chosen to

be king over all of the older sons wasn't exactly this since

that wasn't inherited. David's dad wasn't king, but it

was very close but but but God often blows up these kinds of

customs and and traditions and laws and says that's not what

we're doing. That's not what we're doing.

God violated the cultural custom and tradition of primogeniture,

and people since then have been asking why, Why, Why did God do

this? And folks have looked for all

sorts of rational, reasonable explanations.

Why did God choose Jacob rather than Esau?

The one that I've heard most often has to do with generally

has to do with character. And folks try to make the

argument that that God being God, could see that Jacob was

higher character, better suited to be the new patriarch than

Esau was because Esau didn't value his birthright enough.

Esau clearly didn't have great value for his birthright.

But Esau was the older. We were told that when he was

born he was hairy. And not just that, he was

apparently born back hair, arm hair, chest hair, everything.

Hairy baby. That'd freak me out a little

bit, but you know, hairy baby. And Esau was a man's man Esau.

Jacob loved her or Isaac loved his son.

Esau, he saw, was a hunter. He was out in the fields.

He worked with the animals and, and, and he was the favorite of

his father. Jacob was clearly a mama's boy

by every definition. He didn't like to go out in the

fields. He didn't want to go hunting.

He wanted to stay home. He learned to cook.

He hung out in the tents. He hung around with his mom.

And one day he saw came back from a hunting trip and he was

hungry. You would have thought, I mean,

you know, you would have thought he would have learned enough

cooking to at least, you know, kill a rabbit and cook it over

and open fire. But but apparently he saw knew

nothing about cooking. He gets back.

He hasn't eaten for days. And he says to Jacob, who just

finished a big pot of Stew, I'm hungry, give me some food.

I'm going to die. And Jacob says, I'll give you a

bowl of Stew if you give me your birthright.

And he saw made the worst deal in the history of deals and he

sold his birthright, his inheritance for a bowl of Stew.

He was they were very rich. It was a dumb move, but he did

it. He did it and people say, well,

you know, how could God have given the blessing of Abraham to

someone like that who didn't even value that blessing and

that birthright enough? Clearly Jacob had higher

character. Now, clearly Jacob did not have

higher character than Esau when they were when their father was

very old and had gone blind. He'd already Jacob already

gotten the birthright, and then he stole the blessing, which was

Blessings were more than just words.

Blessings made an impact on a person's life.

They had an actual effect on the future.

When someone in in Isaac's position gave a blessing, he

couldn't just give it to everyone.

He gave a blessing to a specific person.

And Jacob, with the help of his mother, disguised himself as

Esau. He did it by taking goat skin

and gluing it to his hands. That's how Harry Esau was.

His father felt goat fur and thought, oh, that's my son Esau.

He was that. That's a hairy dude.

I have no idea why the Bible was so intent on telling us how

hairy Esau was, but there you go.

And Jacob pretended to be Esau and Isaac gave Jacob Esau's

blessing and and and Jacob just stole it.

He just flat stole it. Jacob manipulated his brother,

took advantage of his brother, stole from his brother, then

later on manipulated and took advantage of his uncle.

Jacob did not have higher character than Esau did.

Why then why did God choose Jacob?

Was it wasn't? Was there something about him

personally, or would he somehow deserve it more?

Had he earned it in some way? Let's take a look because Paul

discusses this in his letter to the Romans.

And the letter to the Romans, just so you know, is often used

as a guidebook on how to be saved.

One of these days we'll preach through Romans.

We'll get there eventually. It is not so much about how to

be saved, but who can be saved, who can be in the Kingdom of

God. And this is a key part of what

Paul says about that. Yet before the twins were born

or had done anything good or bad, there was no known

characteristics about them. There was no moral behavior, no

way to earn anything either by having certain characteristics

or behaving better than the other, before they done

anything, good or bad, while they were still in their

mother's womb. In order that God's purpose and

election might stand not by works, but by Him who calls, She

was told. The older will serve the

younger, just as it is written. Jacob I have loved, but Esau I

hated. What then shall we say, Is God

unjust? Not at all, For he says to

Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy.

I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.

It does not therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on

God's mercy. God chose Jacob to demonstrate

that God could choose Jacob. It's like when our kids say,

Mom, Mom, why do I have to do that?

Because I said so. Dad, Dad, why can't I do that?

Because I said so. God, God, why did you choose

Jacob? Because I did.

Because that's the answer we get.

It's a most unsatisfying answer from where I'm sitting.

I would like to know the reasons, right?

What if we know the reasons? Then we can imitate Jacob and

try to get God to show favor to us.

This is why God doesn't give us the reasons or why It simply is

the reason God chose Jacob, to demonstrate that God can choose

whomever God wants, whomever God wants.

Trying to explain or justify God's choice of Jacob is a waste

of time, and it misses the point because the point is this.

God's choices supersede our customs, our traditions, and our

laws. God is not bound by the custom

or the law of primogeniture. Now here's an interesting thing.

Primogeniture was made a law for God's people through Moses.

Book of Deuteronomy says the first born will inherit, first

born son will inherit, will inherit, and God is telling.

God is giving us an example in Scripture clear as day can't be

erased, can't mean it's this is a big part of the main storyline

in the Bible. This is not some little side

quest. This is the main storyline and

God blows up his own law. It is so important for God, for

to God, for us to know that God is in charge, that God says you

can't even hold me accountable to the laws that I've given you.

Here's another way of saying it, God saying I don't want you to

worship the Bible. I don't want you to worship the

law. I want you to worship me, God.

Follow me, God. That's the point, that God is in

charge, that our task is to follow God, not to take things

God has said or done in the past and craft them into laws and

philosophies that we now then enforce on ourselves or others

and expect God to enforce to. It was so important to God for

his people to understand this, that he did it repeatedly and he

did it. He did it very early and he did

it often throughout the Scripture to say I'm in charge

and we'll talk about why that's so important in just a minute.

I want to talk about I entirely, completely, horribly mislabeled

this slide because I've got 4 bullet points under here and

none of them are practical. It's theology, it's doctrine.

There are some practical things I'm going to pull out when we

get there, but the bullet points themselves are not practical.

I apologize. I need to do a better job of

labeling my slides. First one here is this, that the

Kingdom of God is not based on what humans assign value to life

in the Kingdom. When we're praying, God, your

Kingdom come, your will be done here on earth just like it is in

heaven. God's Kingdom, God's society,

the culture that God is creating is not based on what humans

assign value to. Now there's a technical word for

that, like there is your primogeniture.

And the word for this when we're talking about cultures and

societies is ascriptive societies.

We're ascriptive value, where human beings ascribe assigned

value to certain things that are generally immutable

characteristics, characteristics we can't change, have little or

no control over, and we assign value on them.

Like when we say that somehow the son is more important than

the daughter, or the first born is more important than all of

the others. We can't change.

Well, you can change the first born.

People would do that when younger brothers would kill

their older brothers. Oh, now I'm the first born.

But you can't change the birth order and, and, and when we

assign value, which is what the cultures in those days did, they

assigned greater value to being a son and greater value to being

first born. There are still some cultures in

this world. I mean, most cultures still,

whether they openly admit it or not, tend to value males over

females, men over women, Not every, you know, things are

getting better, but there's still work to do.

But there's some cultures that still openly and clearly value

men over women. And having sons is a much better

thing than having daughters. Why?

This is very arbitrary to me. It's, it's, I mean, I've, I've

heard philosophical justifications for it, but

they're, they're, they're all these, they're, they're

philosophical justifications made by men to explain why we

need to keep this in place, right?

It's arbitrary. We're justifying an arbitrary

decision. First born is even more

arbitrary. You know, sometimes a first born

is a knucklehead. Why do you want to make the

Because it was simple and it was easy and it greased the wheels

in ways that, that, that, that you know, but it was assigned

value. Assigned value.

Skin color has been an incredibly significant assigned

value, at least for the past 400 years, maybe longer, but at

least for the past 400 years, that people were more valuable,

literally more valuable if they were white skin as opposed to

brown skin. And and God is blowing all of

that out of the water saying whatever you assign value to

doesn't bind God. You can't bind me with that.

The New Testament makes it very clear when God says in Christ,

when we are in Christ, when we are in the Kingdom of God, there

is no Jew or Greek, there is no male or female.

You're all one in Christ Jesus. This business of assigned value,

whatever you human beings are doing with that, whatever

arbitrary things you decide about some people, you're

height. Height is a weird one.

I can't remember the numbers, but something like 90% or 95% of

Fortune 500 CE OS are over 6 feet tall.

Somehow we value tall people over short people.

I don't get it. Society has yet to figure out

that bald is better than Harry. But you know, I'm still waiting

for that assigned value. Now that we do that, we get

whatever we do. God says I am not bound by that.

I'm not I'm not. Kingdom of God is not based on

what humans assign value to. The flip side on this too is

which is the other type of society.

That, or the other aspect that that many in society pursue with

with great intensity is that the Kingdom of God is not a

meritocracy either. It's not.

There is no sense in which Jacob merited the birthright and the

blessing more than Esau did. None.

And Paul makes that clear. The Holy Spirit speaking through

Paul, there was This was not a question of Jacob being gooder

than Esau was, of Esau somehow being morally bad and Jacob

being morally good. It was not about that God chose

Jacob and it had nothing to do with merit.

That's also in the New Testament when God says in Christ, not

only is there no Jew or Greek, there's no male or female,

there's also no slave or free. Being a valuable, significant,

high achieving, powerful human being does not make someone any

more valuable to God than if they have none of that.

It's not about those things. The Kingdom of God is not based

on what we assign value to, and it's not based on what we can

achieve or the achievements that we assign value to, which is the

other, you know? Well, I don't go too far down

that rabbit hole. We, the Kingdom of God, neither

assigned value nor earned value. Meritocracy, the Kingdom of God.

Well, not getting our preference is often a sign of God's will

being done. It's a very different concept,

but we're going to tie all of these three together before we

get to the 4th 1. So you know the Lord's Prayer,

our Father, let's say it together, our Father, which art

in heaven, hallowed be thy name, Thy Kingdom come.

Thy will be done. We'll stop there.

Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done.

God, when we pray that we're praying God, we want your will

to be done. The implication every time we

pray that is we're saying, God, please don't do what I want to

be done. We're praying for our will not

to be done. We want God's will to be done.

Jesus prayed both sides of it in the garden.

God, thy will not mine be done at one of those times in my

life, adult life, that I was whining.

I I'm a whiner. I admit it.

One of my moral failings, character flaws.

I'm a whiner. I was whining to a pastor friend

of mine and he said, you know, Scott, if, if, if what you want

is being done, there's a really good chance that that's not

God's will. But if what you don't want is

being done, then there's a good chance that that is God's will

because that's what you pray that I will not mine be done.

I hated that. I still hate that.

That is so irritating. I want God to want what I want.

I want God to value what I value.

I want God to reward me based on my merits and kind of, you know,

overlook and forgive my flaws. When we're not getting our

preference, there is a much greater chance that God's will

is being done than ours. Let's tie this together and, and

make this actually practical instead of just theoretical.

There are two times in the history of the nation of Israel,

the nation of Israel back in the ancient days, they got, they got

this stuff wrong. They got the assigned value

wrong and they got the meritocracy wrong, and they

began to believe not only that they were God's chosen people,

which was true. God made that clear.

I chose Abraham, I chose Isaac, I chose Jacob.

I've chosen their descendants. You are my chosen people.

I chose to rescue you from slavery in Egypt.

I chose to give you land in, in around the Jordan River and, and

that is the land I have promised you.

It belonged to other people. I give it to you now your land.

I've chosen you. And they took that being chosen

by God and said God chose us. It must be because we're better.

Why else would God have chosen us?

And they assumed they were in a meritocracy.

And since God had chosen them, that made them better.

They merited being chosen by God.

They'd earned being chosen by God.

Or they would have said, you know, God values us more than

God values other people otherwise would.

God wouldn't have chosen us. God has assigned us value that's

greater than value of other people.

And we're better either way you slice it, we're better.

And that's why God has chosen us.

And because God has chosen us and because we're better, God's

going to protect us and God's going to care for us.

And, and God has to do that because that's the promise that

God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

That's the promise that God made to David.

One of your descendants would sit on the throne forever.

That's God's bound to do those things.

And they began in their pride and in their arrogance of we

deserve this because we're inherently better or because

we've earned it. They began to do really awful

things. And they got so far away that

the only way that God could show them that they hadn't earned it

and that they weren't more valuable was that God let first

the Babylonians and then a few 100 years later the Romans come

in and destroy their nation and destroy their capital and kill

or deport the majority of their people.

And somehow out of all of that, their prophets saw and learned

and tried to teach them. We got it wrong.

We're not better. We're not more valuable.

Our destruction was not a sign that God has failed.

It is a sign. It is a sign that God's will is

being done. Our destruction is God's will

because we became the sort of people that God did not intend

us to be. We were no longer living out

God's Kingdom. We were living out our own will,

believing ourselves to be more valuable than others, ourselves

to have merited grace from God that we have not merited, and

not getting their preferences. God will redirect us.

I believe God does it in the gentlest way possible to get our

attention. And when we get far enough off

track, the further off track we get, generally the more painful

the exercises that we have to go through to get back on track.

Not getting our preferences often a sign of God's will being

done and reception into God's Kingdom and life in God's

Kingdom is not a matter of our value or our merit, but of God's

choice. And that's the best news there

can be. Because Jesus is the one

choosing teams. Jesus is the one choosing sides.

And Jesus isn't just picking his friends.

And Jesus isn't looking for the people that are going to help

him win. Jesus doesn't need our help

winning. He's looking for people who will

live in his Kingdom. He picks you and you and you and

you and you and you and you and you and you and you and me and

you and all of they got I want you.

I want you. I pick you.

You don't have to earn it. You don't have to have some sort

of characteristic that the rest of the world finds valuable,

whether it's birth order or gender or skin color or wealth

or status or what. You don't have to have any of

those things. Nationality.

I pick you. You're included in my Kingdom

because I chose you. I chose you.

That is such good news because if entry in and life in the

Kingdom of God is based on merit, we are all going to fall

at some point. We will all fall.

We will all fail. If entry into the Kingdom of God

is based on some sort of immutable characteristic, then

the vast majority of people will not be included right off the

bat because they don't have that characteristic.

And even those that do have it will likely eventually lose it.

They'll be superseded. They'll be supplanted.

Or the values can change, which they always do in cultures and

kingdoms. What's value changes.

But God doesn't change. And God's promises don't change.

And God's choice doesn't change. We get to be in the Kingdom of

God. We get to be a part of this

mission, in this ministry, because God has chosen us.

Not because we've earned it. Not because we deserve it, not

because we have. Somehow we're more special than

other people are just because God has chosen us.

It's a very humbling thing and it's a very freeing thing.

We don't have to earn it. We don't have to deserve it.

And whoever we are, regardless of our skin color, regardless of

our gender, regardless of our social status, regardless of our

intellect, regardless of what we have achieved or failed to

achieve or not even tried to achieve, God says, I want you

mighty come on over. And all we have to do is say yes

and receive it and live. It is not easy.

There's there's work to do that our, our position in the Kingdom

of God is based on God's promises, not on our merit and

not on our characteristics. And that's the hope we have that

it's God's choice. It's God's choice in Jesus name,

Amen.